The Hierophant

✦ Title

5. The Hierophant

✦ Associations

Earth / Taurus (Venus)

✦ Keywords

Established systems of knowledge and belief, tradition, orthodoxy, ancestral wisdom, teaching and learning.

✦ Quote

I don't know. I imagine good teaching as a circle of earnest people sitting down to ask each other meaningful questions. I don't see it as a handing down of answers. — Alice Walker, Meridian

✦ Meaning

✦ Domain and Role

Saint Peter's Cathedral, the Musée du Louvre, your local library, Wikipedia—what do these have in common? They are all the domain of the Hierophant, who is the collector, preserver, and purveyor of all established human knowledge and belief. The complement to the High Priestess, whose domain is internal knowledge and intuition, the Hierophant is all knowledge that comes from outside ourselves. They are the teacher, the scholar, and the student, and they are also the guru, the priest, and the ancestor passing down wisdom. Any time we engage with external sources of knowledge or belief, the Hierophant is there. From the decaying ciphers of fading papyri to the digital meme-banks of the internet which never forgets, the Hierophant offers to us the wisdom of ages.

✦ Traditional Title and Imagery

The traditional title of this card is 'The Pope,' and the usual imagery is of a papal or religious figure. This connects to knowledge and teaching perhaps through the Pope's role as intermediary between God and the common people. The Pope was (and still is by many) seen as the mouthpiece of God, the bridge between heaven and earth, divinely appointed to interpret the holy knowledge for the regular folk to understand. However, we know today that the Church, among its various other sins, actually withheld more knowledge than it shared, and twisted much of it to suit its purposes, besides. This is at cross-purposes with the Tarot, the mission of which is to open a path to transcendent truth and eternal knowledge.

✦ Misconceptions and Renaming

Due to its Christian imagery and the connotations therein, the Hierophant has become pigeon-holed as being mostly about religion, orthodoxy, and conforming to the norms of society. Indeed, these are all meanings that the Hierophant encompasses, but they are only one face of the archetype, as A. E. Waite himself points out in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. The confusion in meanings that can arise from a papal card is one of the reasons Waite cites for replacing the traditional title of 'Pope' with the name we ascribe to it today: the Hierophant.

✦ Etymology

The word 'Hierophant' comes from the ancient Greek words for 'the holy' and 'to show,' making the Hierophant a revealer of holy knowledge, not a concealer of it. Our archetype of the purveyor of knowledge and wisdom must stand for freely offering this access, not controlling or manipulating it.

✦ Librarian Metaphor

A better Hierophant, then, may be a librarian. The library is a sacred space devoted to free, open access to human knowledge and wisdom—a kind of secular church, if you will. In its hallowed stacks, people discover a safe space dedicated to learning and scholarship, as well as to providing resources and education to the community. Librarians, who we might call the priests of knowledge, connect seekers to the right texts that may house their answers, and they also offer practical aid in areas like applying to jobs, finding housing, and computer literacy.

✦ Astrological Connection

I emphasize this real-world assistance because it connects the archetype to its ruling astrological sign of Taurus, the fixed earth sign associated with practicality, stability, and generosity, as well as with spirituality. As with anything that values tradition, libraries can be slow to adopt new technologies and updated systems, also recalling Taurus the Bull's stubbornness and slowness to change. But, like the cosmic Bull, these custodians of the wisdom of ages do adapt in time. Librarians, of all people, know that knowledge is not an inert and stagnant thing. Knowledge is alive.

✦ Card Inspiration

The librarian on this card is based on real-life librarian Carla Hayden, the current United States Librarian of Congress as of this writing. Hayden is both the first woman and the first African American to serve in that position, and she is the first professional librarian to hold the position in over 60 years, representing a return to the values of the library and a shift away from the white male political patriarchy of old.

✦ Historical Example

Before becoming Librarian of Congress, Hayden served as head of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland. During the uprising following Freddie Gray's death in police custody in 2015, while the rest of the city shut down, Hayden kept the libraries open, even the branch at the epicenter of the unrest. Her reasoning, in her own words, was that libraries are a "place of refuge and relief and opportunity," a description of a sanctuary if ever there was one.

✦ Essence and Offer

So the Hierophant is teacher and learner, seeker and scribe, a caretaker of the minds and souls of their community, but above all else they are the librarian of eternity, preserving knowledge in order to make it forever available to all who seek it. Where the High Priestess presents the lock, the Hierophant offers the keys. Here, they say, the book is open for you to read.

✦ Task and Challenge

Our task—and our privilege—is to learn from the Hierophant's library, to sit at the feet of the visionaries and scholars who came before us, to partake of the annals of human wisdom. Our challenge is to do this without becoming sycophantic followers or over-credulous believers, to learn while retaining independent thought, and to not mistake tradition for truth or dogma for divinity.

✦ Admonition

Don't believe everything you read, the Hierophant says, but read everything.

✦ Closing Maxim

Wisdom is knowing that knowledge changes.